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Jobs we love

A long time ago I read a blurb in some magazine that argued that sure, you could select a subject you actually enjoy when choosing your university major or your career or whatever, but what you really want to do is choose something that maximizes your income, the reasoning being that money tends to be useful. At the time, being an idealistic youth who did not have or particularly feel the need for money, I did not find that reasoning very compelling, so I went ahead and ignored it and chose computer science for my major.

That turned out not to be the worst possible choice money-wise because the market situation at the time of my graduation happened to be just right and I found a nice, rent-paying job rather quickly. And to this day I struggle with the picture in my head of this blurb in the magazine that tried to convince me to go into finance or management or health care or something. Would it have ruined my life? Or would I now be a multi-millionaire who owns a bunch of nice homes with impressive backyards? Who knows!

And if I think of the people who this blurb supposedly actually addressed – those who were thinking of entering fields with names like Bashkirology or Deconstructive Sociology or Physics – many of those people seem… fine? A lot of them have grudgingly accepted jobs that pay them money and those jobs have turned out not be so bad after all. Others have married well-off engineers or doctors, so their nominal incomes don’t bother them very much, and maybe they have since divorced and got to keep a good amount of money for themselves. Most seem to be living in nice homes, some of which with impressive backyards. So their strategy can’t have been all that bad!

Law school is just for fun

I was reminded of this when I attended a summer school on Japanese law in the spring. The professor who was leading the event asked me what I was doing there in my something-other-than-a-law-student capacity. When I replied that I was just there for fun, he asked why I wasn’t considering law school. I found it very flattering that he would ask me that at my age, but it did leave me wondering: I suppose you could just switch fields completely in your 40s. Should you? What if that means going from a higher-paying profession to a lower-paying one? How dumb (or financially safe) would you have to be to decide to do so? (Also: Would it still be fun if you received money for it? It isn’t obvious!)

Indeed, what about downgrading your career in other ways? Say you are a Most Distinguished Principal Engineer, but really prefer to be a Just Highly Distinguished Foot Soldier Engineer? Should you?

Will you be happier with your job? Does it mean you now have to go look for a wealthy engineer or doctor to marry?

Annoyingly, I nowadays find myself forced to admit that the blurb in the magazine had a point. Money sure is useful. Having enough of it gives you lots of life options. You can marry someone poor! You can buy a house! You can get a babysitter and play video games all day! It’s nice! Maybe hating your job isn’t so bad after all!

Maybe at least aim for the middle. And then wait until the Era of AI comes around in a few years and jobs are a thing of the past. Then you can ignore what the annoying magazines say.

Is the “spec-driven development” trend a failure in heeding the Bitter Lesson? Or is it a practical temporary crutch until example-driven development becomes the norm?